Anne Curzan

English professor Anne Curzan actually encourages her students to use slang in class. A language historian, she is fascinated by how people use words—and by how this changes.

Why you should listen

Anne Curzan is a collector of slang words, a dissector of colloquialisms and a charter of language evolution. To put it most simply, she is a Professor of English at the University of Michigan who studies how the English language works and how it has changed over time. As she puts it in her talk, “The English language is rich, vibrant and filled with the creativity of the people who speak it.”

Anne Curzan shows how new words like "hangry" or "adorkable" get sealed in dictionaries. Some might lament these types of words as the death of a language, but Curzan says they reveal that a language is living, breathing, and growing.